Endless Legacy Ch. 44 (DC Comics)

A/N: The Birds of Prey bounce ideas off one another~

-x-X-x-

When Barbara hesitates, Dinah and Helena look at each other again, their concern mounting.

“Barbara, you can’t-!”

“No.”

She cuts Dinah off at that, making up her mind right then and there. Not just because Dinah says ‘she can’t’, and that phrase has become a bit of a trigger for her throughout these years in a wheelchair… but Barbara would be lying if she said that didn’t play a big part in things.

Silence falls at her response, and Barbara huffs before crossing her arms over her chest as she looks at Dinah and Helena both.

“He doesn’t need to know yet. This isn’t his case. He passed it off to me because he’s busy and couldn’t handle it himself. He knew that likely meant I would have the Birds of Prey handle it if it wasn’t anything too serious or directly tied to him and his business. And that’s precisely what’s going to happen. We’re going to handle this.”

There’s a pregnant pause at that, in which Barbara stares her friends down with as challenging a look as she can muster. Finally though, she sees the moment that the two heroines both get with the program and get on board with Barbara’s proposal.

“… Alright Babs, we’re in.”

“Of course we’re in, you know we wouldn’t leave you high and dry.”

Barbara smiles at that, basking in their loyalty for a moment. To be fair, neither woman was particularly close to Batman. They didn’t even know his true identity. She, as Oracle, was the main connection between him and her fellow Birds of Prey.

However, that didn’t change the reputation Batman had, both in Gotham and in the Justice League. His mythos alone was enough to have Dinah and Helena questioning her decision not to bring him in. Still, with that behind them now, Barbara feels a sense of relief wash over her.

“Great. Read the rest of the data on the tablet and then give me your first thoughts.”

Nodding, the other heroines do so. Barbara, meanwhile, gets a glass of water and downs the first of the pills. Now that she knows they’re not hiding anything dangerous, she’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Especially when the alternative is either prolonging her full recovery, or having to order a metric fuck ton of food to make up for the caloric deficiency that ‘Doctor’ Luke’s machine left her in.

… If it even was the machine. Barbara frowns as she looks over the information coming in from her bug again. Nothing has changed, but it’s always useful to check out old information with fresh eyes every once in a while.

Speaking of which…

“So wait, if the tube is fake, how the hell did you still get healed?”

Helena’s confusion is understandable, and Barbara tips her head in acknowledgment to the point. Dinah, meanwhile, hums.

“Well… it might not be fake, right? Maybe it’s alien tech after all… just alien tech we’ve never seen before. And also alien tech so far beyond us we don’t have the capacity to comprehend it.”

Scoffing at Dinah’s theory, Helana immediately begins poking the more obvious holes in it.

“So then how is Lex Luthor utilizing it if that’s the case? How is this Maximillian Doctor fellow managing to utilize it if it’s so advanced?”

But Dinah isn’t down for the count just yet.

“Well, perhaps this… Luke Maximillian is actually an alien in disguise? It wouldn’t be the first time… not by a long shot. He could be a fugitive… THAT wouldn’t be a first either. So he comes to Earth, because lord knows aliens love to come hide out on our planet, and he brings some technology with him. And somehow he and Luthor get in touch and Luthor becomes his patron or something?”

Helana looks more thoughtful now, placing a hand under her chin as she hums.

“… But if that were the case, why would Luthor ever let him use such technology in a free clinic of all things? And yeah, I know that the super healing in particular was far from free, Barbara paid out the nose for it, but all the same… Luthor would be more likely to hole such a prize up in a research lab somewhere, where he could reverse engineer the technology and use it to make himself look like the second coming of Jesus Christ or something, right?”

This… this was why she’d made the Birds of Prey. And it was also why she’d called Dinah and Helena in. Fresh eyes on the situation and already they were coming up with new ideas. Now, did Barbara think Luke was an alien fugitive? Probably not, but she couldn’t rule it out. Even if her experience told her that the tube she’d been put in seemed as fake as several other examples of fake alien tech she’d seen over the years… she wasn’t infallible. She could be fooled.

“There’s also the magic angle to think about girls.”

Dinah and Helena both pause at that, before begrudgingly nodding. Helena just frowns some more though.

“If it is magic, my points still stand though. Why is something like that here in Gotham, instead of in a LexCorp laboratory or practically anywhere else where Luthor has more power and influence? Why would he risk such a find in his very first successful push into Gotham City?”

That was a good point. Things weren’t adding up. Lex Luthor had tried and failed for years to get a foothold in Gotham. Now here he was, having finally succeeded despite everyone’s best efforts. Even still, risking this sort of healing in a single small clinic in Gotham was… well, it was kind of crazy. Unless there was a catch of some sort.

“There has to be a catch of some sort.”

Dinah’s words echo Barbara’s thought so eerily that Barbara can’t help but grin. Leaning back against the table behind herself, she tilts her head to the side as she considers the other heroines.

“We need more information, ladies. I have one avenue so far that I’m considering exploring, but I’m open to suggestions as well.”

Helena and Dinah both grow thoughtful for a moment, clearly turning the dilemma over in their heads. Finally, Dinah shrugs and speaks first.

“… We could leak the super healing to a criminal or two and see what happens and how the clinic reacts when they’re outright attacked? Mr. Freeze, for instance, would probably leap at another opportunity to cure his wife.”

Barbara frowns at the mention of the cold-themed supervillain. Freeze’s tale was positively tragic, even compared to many of the similarly tragic backstories for Gotham’s gallery of misfits and ne’er dowels. He was only doing what he did out of love for his wife and a desire to see her saved, but her illness was so rare and inexplicable that his every attempt to cure her so far had ended in failure.

That said…

“If we tell one criminal, we might as well tell them all. While I’m sure Freeze would guard the information with his life, his PhD is on cryogenics, not cyber security. More than that, leaking information like that would make it impossible for us to control when such an attack occurred… innocents might wind up caught in the crossfire.”

Dinah nods, accepting Barbara’s critique without issue. Both of them knew Barbara hadn’t said an outright ‘no’ to the idea… which meant that it was still on the table, despite its flaws. It just wasn’t their first option.

Helena clears her throat, speaking up next.

“I could go in. Infiltrate under the cover of night and get us more information. I’m sure you could get me a device that would download their files or give a backdoor into their systems. The healing tech might be alien technology beyond our comprehension, but the rest of it is human, right?”

… Right. Barbara slowly nods, even as she eyes Huntress contemplatively. On the one hand, she didn’t doubt Helena’s skills for even a second. On the other hand…

“It’s not a bad idea, but it is an escalation. If you get caught, they’ll know we’re investigating.”

The Huntress scoffs at that, crossing her arms over her chest.

“IF I get caught, sure.”

Barbara smiles and rolls her eyes at Helena’s confidence. It’s well-earned to be fair, but at the same time…

“While you’re right that most of what I saw looked like human technology, if the healing tech truly IS alien, then they might have other alien technology as well… like alien security. You’re good, Helena, but no one is perfect. And once they know that they’re being investigated, they’ll be much more on guard.”

Dinah interjects then, humming.

“To be fair, if they don’t already think they’re being investigated, then they’re absolute morons. Anything that came of Luthor finally managing to sink his claws into this city even an inch was always going to be investigated to hell and back. The blowhard even put his damn name on it.”

“Fair point, but there’s a big difference between thinking you’re being investigated and knowing it. And a big difference in the way you act as well.”

The other Birds both have to nod at that, conceding the point. Barbara, meanwhile, hesitates for a moment longer before finally biting the bullet.

“Helena’s plan isn’t bad… but I think I want to tackle this from another angle first. If the Huntress shows up at the clinic so soon after ‘Hope Laville’ received healing, then the Hope identity will be burned. However… I slipped the ‘doctor’ in charge of the clinic my number. I’m thinking I might be able to play up the part of a hopelessly enamored heiress who just got her health back a bit further… and reach out to him first. It shouldn’t be out of the question for me to have a line to him or be overeager enough to call before he does.”

“… You want to honeypot him?”

Dinah’s skepticism is shared by Helena, judging by the look on the other woman’s face. Both are looking at Barbara somewhat incredulously. Barbara pouts at them.

“What? It’s the perfect cover. Obviously, ‘Hope’ has lived a relatively lonely life, not only being confined to a wheelchair but also the hidden survivor of her family’s massacre. And of course she’s not going to really have anyone else to reach out to or understand social cues. Now maybe he won’t bite… but I think it’s worth a shot at least.”

They still don’t look convinced, but Barbara is in charge here, sort of. In the end, she just rolls her eyes at the others.

“Look, all I’m saying is we give it a try before we potentially burn that identity and give Luke and his silent bodyguard a reason to suspect something is amiss. It can’t hurt, right?”

-x-X-x-

“… You know, I suspect something was amiss about our first rich client.”

Laying back in bed, staring up at the ceiling, Lucien has a thoughtful frown on his face. Meanwhile, Blackfire lifts her head from his bared chest and looks at him with a raised eyebrow. The smell of sex is heavy in the room as the two enjoyed one another’s company quite thoroughly for the last couple hours or so after closing up the clinic for the evening.

“Oh? Was it the odor of desperation so heavy it flooded the senses? Tch, and it only got worse after you healed her too. She just went from desperate to get her legs back, to desperate to get into your pants.”

Lucien gives Blackfire a half-amused, half-bemused glance at her caustic words towards ‘Hope Laville’. It’s obvious that the disguised Tamaranean didn’t think much of the wheelchair bound girl. Though after she’s done shitting all over the poor dear, she does get a frown of her own on her face.

“Unless you’re saying she was lying about something. But… you would have said if she wasn’t really paralyzed, right? Or would you not have?”

That… Lucien honestly doesn’t know. He considers the question for a moment before shrugging.

“I guess I wouldn’t have, at least until she was fully gone. Then I would have told you. I mean… she paid upfront, as expected, so it wasn’t like it would have mattered if she wasn’t truly paralyzed. But no… she definitely was. And it was a bullet that did the paralyzing too, that wasn’t a lie either. However…”

Blackfire watches as he furrows his brow, processing his thoughts for a moment before explaining.

“It’s just… well, I get a lot of information when I use my power on someone else. And from what I understand… I don’t think that was Hope Laville.”

Blackfire stiffens at that, and then lifts herself up onto a hand to look at him.

“Then who the fuck was it?”

Lucien shrugs.

“No clue her exact identity. But we of course did a background check on her ahead of time, and… well, the Laville Family definitely looked like our ‘Hope’. Even the pictures of Hope herself as a child looked right. But the woman I just healed tonight was a natural red head with green eyes.”

Blackfire gnashes her teeth.

“And you healed her anyways? You just let her walk out like that?”

Lucien gives his ‘henchwoman’ another look.

“Yes. I did. She isn’t the only one hiding her true identity, and I wasn’t about to give anything away with a confrontation that might blow our cover. Besides, even if she wasn’t actually Hope Laville, the money was still good and she actually was in need of healing.”

Huffing, Blackfire shakes her head.

“… This isn’t over. She’s not going to give up. I suppose now I know why she was trying to pry into your love life.”

Shrugging, Lucien relaxes back into the pillows and smirks.

“Well it’s not like it matters. She might not be who she says she was, but she also wasn’t anyone too special, at least biology-wise. Sure, she gave me her number, but I don’t exactly have to call her or anything. Real Hope Laville or not, we’re probably never going to see or speak to her ever again.”

There’s a beat… and then his phone on the nightstand begins to ring. Blinking, Lucien reaches over and picks it up, his brow furrowing when he sees that it’s an unknown caller… but the number… the number is familiar.

“No way…”

“What? Who is it?”

It’s the exact number that ‘Hope Laville’ gave him earlier, Lucien knows it is. He hadn’t saved it to his phone though or anything, so it wasn’t coming up as her.

“She’s calling.”

Blackfire squawks at that, before glaring at the phone as though personally offended. Lucien, meanwhile, is suddenly contemplative. Blowing their cover was one thing. But if this fake ‘Hope’ was this desperate, then that meant there was probably no stopping her from continuing to pry.

Seeing the incredulous look Blackfire is giving him, Lucien shrugs.

“I mean… it would be a shame not to see where this leads, right?”

Still, he hesitates… was he really going to pick up the phone?